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Our Blogs Open Sauce Shared source: just another red herring
Our Blogs Open Sauce Shared source: just another red herring | Shared source: just another red herring |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Thursday, 02 August 2007 | |
  
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More specifically, the company has announced that it has, or will be, submitting some of its "shared source" licences to the Open Source Initiative for approval. To me, it's like replaying a dream all over again (coincidentally, I've been catching up on a lot of lost sleep over the last few days), and a bad dream at that. How can a company which has built its financial foundation on not revealing code, suddenly change its attitude? Short answer: it won't and has no intention of doing so. Then why bother with all the talk about "shared source"? The answer is fairly simple again: a red herring. Microsoft people love to overly complicate a simple concept, throw out a dozen definitions or more about one thing to confuse an audience, and then try to make people that believe that it is going to eat its own profits for lunch. In this it is helped by the legions of people who still cling to a belief that Microsoft wants to interact on equal terms with developers of free and open source software. To these legions, I say dream on. The announcement about submitting licences to the OSI was made at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention last week by Bill Hilf, the man who heads Microsoft's "open source" laboratory. Hilf's talk can be seen here . It is one of the worst presentations I have ever seen simply because he is all over the place. Something like the man described so brilliantly by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, the man with such a fantastic memory that he remembers too much. The only substance in Hilf's talk is the announcement about submission of some of Microsoft's "shared source" licences to the OSI. Tim O'Reilly, who organises the OSCON, later praised the announcement. One fact which O'Reilly failed to mention is that Microsoft was a big sponsor of the event. Ah, disclosure, it can sometimes undermine even the best of us. In what is becoming an increasingly common tactic, a few hours later, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, was busy motoring in the opposite direction as Hilf. To quote from Microsoft-Watch , Ballmer told the company's annual financial analysts' meeting: "Open source has been the issue that surrounds us. Could a commercial model like Microsoft compete with open source? And we've worked very hard on making the value of a commercial company surpass what the open-source community can deliver, because frankly, it's not a business model we can embrace. It's inconsistent with shareholder value." (I would have preferred to read the entire speech but it isn't available on Microsoft's website as of this writing.) It does create some confusion, doesn't it? And that is exactly the point. Does anybody out there think that Hilf is running some kind of separate agenda to Ballmer? Will Hilf's apparent efforts to bring about some change in Microsoft's business philosophy transcend Ballmer's policy? Dream on. During his talk at OSCON, Hilf mentioned that the company had set up a new website to provide information about its "open source" efforts. I could find little there apart from the same tired talk that Microsoft has tried at least a dozen times before this to try and convince everyone that its efforts to co-exist with open source are kosher. There's plenty of FUD and weasel words at the site but then you didn't need me to tell you that. Just as a fighter plane throws out flares left and right in order to distract heat-seeking missiles, Microsoft throws out these morsels from time to time in order to try and unsettle its competitors. And it tries to win over those it can, using the one thing of which it has plenty - money. And that's the only thing which Microsoft understands. |
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